BACKGROUND Qualitative research methods are increasingly used within clinical trials to address broader research questions than can be addressed by quantitative methods alone. These methods enable health professionals, service users, and other stakeholders to contribute their views and experiences to evaluation of healthcare treatments, interventions, or policies, and influence the design of tr...

Fault detection by stochastic qualitative reasoning is an effective way for complex systems such as air conditioning systems. In this framework, the faulty part of a system can be identified by comparing the behavior derived by stochastic qualitative reasoning with the actual measured behavior. The latter is represented as the series of qualitative values that are obtained by classifying quanti...

This paper discusses a general approach to qualitative modeling based on fuzzy logic. The method of qualitative modeling is divided into two parts: fuzzy modeling and linguistic approximation. It proposes to use a fuzzy clustering method (fuzzy c-means method) to identify the structure of a fuzzy model. To clarify the advantages of the proposed method, it also shows some examples of modeling, a...

it development and its ease of use have caused the organizations to equip their processing and operations through it. it has been over a century that performance assessment has been a significant issue for management and actually has been performed in different ways. the current study aims to discover the effect of e-mail on performance assessment. therefore, mixed method has been used. the res...

This paper is an initial review of literature, investigating qualitative research, to show its relevance in information system disciplines. Qualitative research involves the use of qualitative data, such as interviews, documents, and participant observation data, to understand and explain social phenomena. Qualitative research can be found in many disciplines and fields, using a variety of appr...

OBJECTIVES In a qualitative synthesis, primary qualitative studies are integrated to develop a theory or evidence-based interventions. Until now, the strength of the evidence in the primary studies has not been taken into account in the outcome of the qualitative synthesis. In this paper, a method is developed and evaluated to assign weights to the findings of the qualitative studies using both...

Strategic decision-making process is a crucial part of strategy formulation and implementation. However, most inquiries into strategic decision-making process use quantitative methods. Even if there have been calls for more qualitative method for decision-making research, most researchers still predominantly use quantitative method as a main tool to find the results. This paper is aimed to chal...

Computer modeling and simulation are indispensable for understanding the functioning of an organism on a molecular level. We present an implemented method for the qualitative simulation of large and complex genetic regulatory networks. The method allows a broad range of regulatory interactions between genes to be represented and has been applied to the analysis of a real network of biological i...

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of metaphor (1980, 1999) provides a basis for describing everyday cognitive structures using linguistic models and thus, making it possible to uncover both individual and collective patterns of thought and action. Lakoff and Johnson have not, however, developed a workable system for carrying out qualitative research. This paper outlines the fundamentals o...